Think of Google’s street view, but catered to one’s past. Made for my abu.

Storytelling

Meet my grandparents. My Aaji (left) and my Abu (right) are both over 90 years old. Despite looking quite fashionable at their age, their energy has slightly declined in the past few years, which has restricted them from visiting the places they helped raise over three generations of family.

After my grandfather was diagnosed with temporary memeory loss, he started loosing those family moments, which he said was one of the scariest feelings ever. As a firm believer in “locational healing”, I came up with an idea to bring the location and its memories to him, through an interactive explorer.

I scoured through hundreds of old photogrpahs to use as both references to build out my model and showcase pieces within the game (these would later be shown within the memory cards).

Ideation

One of the biggest inspirations for this project was the exploration of Google Maps. Google Maps offers users the ability to essentially drop a virtual person on any given street in the world and walk around as if they were actually there. The only major flaw is the low-quality image renders and inability to walk in and out of buildings. While I do understand this is a minimal viable product, I thought I could take a snippet of this concept and integrate it into something bigger.

(Re)Creating

Once I have all my reference assets ready to go, I will start modeling the house and other parts of the lot. During this process, I learned to split up my 3D assets into different files. Since they were such large files, splitting them up made it easy for my computer to handle all the assets. Additionally, I made sure to keep a control object for proportion, meaning when I brought all 3D assets together in the developing stage, they would all match up properly.